Busing, sports, schools attached to correctional institutions with crazy-high (six figures) per pupil spending may be in the same system and that may not be true everywhere. High health insurance costs for staff.

A few things off the top of my head that may be different (or maybe not!) but there could well be more.

OTOH lots of other places have far better school lunches and they’re free, but maybe those aren’t budgeted under the school but some other department. Lots of ways to get different outcomes with different accounting, without even doing anything plainly incorrect.

Are there schools attached to correctional institutions in NYC driving up the $38,000 per student spending? If we at just guessing, how about: New Yorkers are just bad at running public services?

We actually had a natural experiment with this during COVID. Schools in Western Europe and Asia quickly got students back in the classroom. But in places like NYC, teachers refused to go back to work for a year or more.

We don’t spend a lot of money because we bus. It’s the other way around: we bus because we have a lot of money to spend.

What happens here particularly often is that insiders (in context of schools, these are teachers and their unions, administrators, consultants, etc) are able to sell more of their services to users, who don’t mind the cost, because it’s spread among non-users (taxpayers), and they have very ability to exercise control over the insiders.

Japan doesn't need to run buses in most areas, because they have a functioning public transport system. They still do run buses in the extreme rurals.

But NYC has an extensive and well funded public transit system. It’s unreliable and unsafe, but that’s just another example of New Yorkers being bad at running government services.

In what manner do you consider taxpayers to be non-users of public schools? If you went to a public school you're continually building on the foundation they provided. If you went to a private school you're continually surrounded by people who are as educated as the system could make them.

The world is currently in a race to see who can make the most advanced microchips the fastest, and we're doing that because it's starting to look like whoever makes the best chips gets to call the shots.

There aren't enough people who grasp the fundamentals well enough to contribute to this effort. Education is now a critical national security concern.

US schools are paying higher wages. We're comparing wages across international boundaries, and we're not adjusting for purchasing parity, so this isn't surprising (and also doesn't mean that US schools pay remotely well).

My number above is from OECD data that adjusts for purchasing power.